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Originally Posted by sniper7
you need to remember who you are talking to. I fly airplanes! You have to tell me things in computer stupid people speak!
Box hold copies of things you dont want to lose
everyone share on network
use electricity and passwords
you buy, me fix for you
I backup duplicates of my important stuff. I use an external hard drive and DVD/CD's so that if my hard drive fails, I can always recover from the opticals. If your worried about hard drive failure, RAID is always nice but can be expensive
The world is ending soon.. who cares about long term storage?
RAID stands for Random Array of Independent Drives. Basically, it allows you to use multiple hard drives together. There is different kinds of raid arrays. RAID 0 and RAID 1 are common. RAID 1 is also known as a mirror array and is used for backups. Basically, whenever you save something, it saves it on two identical hard drives at once, one being an exact mirror of the other, automatically. Might also think of them working parallel. RAID 0 is aka stripe array. When you save or upload from the array, it pulls from all the drives at once, each one recording or loading a part of the file, and greatly increases the speed that files can be accessed. Problem is, if one drive fails, the whole thing goes down. Some setups are a hybrid of the two, and allows it to make a backup on one huge drive, or several drives, so if a drive fails on a RAID 0, replace the bad one, and basically do a recovery. Hopefully that makes a little sense. RAID 0 makes windows move alot faster, RAID 1 is great to make backups of important things. Just remember, if there is a fire, or so on, its all gone anyways. Burning his pictures to blueray discs, and storing them in a safety deposit box might be the only foolproof way for him.
What medium you want to use to backup your data really depends upon how much data you need to backup and how frequently you need to access it. For the average PC user that wants to backup their personal files you are best served with using USB Flash Memory sticks to backup your data.
If you are backing up 32 GB or less and don't need to access it frequently its more cost effective to use a USB Flash Memory stick. You can find USB Flash Memory sticks everywhere for $10 - $20 depending on how many GB you need. They are cheap enough to allow you to easily make multiple copies of your data on separate USB Sticks so you can store them in multiple safe locations. An additional benefit is that they are small and fairly rugged. If you store them in a climate controlled environment they will last a long long time.
If you have 100GB - 2TB worth of data to back up but still don't need to access it frequently then an external USB hard drive would work out the best. These can usually be found from $50 - $100 at just about any electronics store. These are usually pretty small and fairly cheap so you can make multiple copies of your data on separate USB hard drives and store them in different locations. Once again, if you store them in a climate controlled environment they will last a long long time.
Once you get past 1TB worth of data to backup using USB attached devices becomes painful because its connectivity speed is relatively slow. It takes a long time to backup 1TB of data over a USB connection. If you have multiple TB worth of data to backup the only realistic and time efficient way is to leverage RAID Disk Arrays or Tape Drives connected via SATA, SCSI, Fiber Channel, SAS, or GB Ethernet. But once you jump into this backup arena you are talking about spending many thousands of dollars in equipment and media. The cost of these type of backup solutions is usually unrealistic for any kind of home PC backup solution.
I use www.mozy.com just had my HD crash and burn and was able to use Mozy Restore Manager to restore all of my files. I believe it costs me $10/month for 2 computers
They are a bit spendy, but if you want the advantages of RAID with a "Green good, Red bad" level of difficulty, the Drobo has been good to me.
http://drobo.com
H.
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I still don't get it